It’s becoming increasingly obvious to most Americans that Republicans have ushered in a new Golden Era of Political Corruption under their president. Law enforcement agents raided Donald Trump’s personal attorney’s home and office reportedly hauling out financial records tracking millions of dollars changing hands, burner phones and possibly even recorded conversations with the president and his associates. So much Sopranos-style excitement surrounding the presidency shouldn’t overshadow Walker’s own enthusiastic effort to return Wisconsin to those brazenly politically corrupt days when politicians would simply pass out cold, hard cash for votes.

If Walker’s vote-buying scheme works statewide, he may achieve what Republicans have failed spectacularly to do nationally. Voters in elections around the country have seen right through the $1.5 trillion Republican tax cut that went overwhelmingly to multimillion-dollar corporations and multimillionaires and billionaires.

The GOP’s Hard Sell

Since that tax cut for the ultra wealthy benefitting Trump and his family is the only legislative achievement by Republicans, they’d hoped to convince ordinary, working-class Americans that making the richest people on Earth even wealthier would somehow benefit them as well. That’s a really hard sell since it isn’t true. When wealthy corporations and investors get hundreds of millions of dollars in enormous tax windfalls, they don’t use it to pass out huge raises to all their employees or to create lots of high-paying new jobs. Instead, they spend it on themselves and hide much of it in offshore accounts so they won’t have to pay any taxes on it.

Even Florida Sen. Marco Rubio, an excessively ambitious Republican, said recently there was “no evidence whatsoever” the Republican tax cut had resulted in any substantial benefits for American workers. They could have told him that. In the recent Pennsylvania congressional election won by Democrat Conor Lamb in a district Trump previously had won by 20 points, Republicans stopped running ads touting the tax cut because voters weren’t being fooled.

So, instead of trying to sell the preposterous idea that enormous tax cuts for wealthy Republican donors benefit ordinary people, Walker decided this election year simply to start handing out $100 bribes to voters. Walker doesn’t call them that, of course. He calls this one-time cash giveaway the Wisconsin Child Sales Tax Rebate. Now through July 2, parents with dependent children under 18 can sign up for checks of $100 per child. The more children they have, the bigger the check. That’s an astonishing reversal for Walker, who is better known for threatening to cut off food assistance and health care for struggling families.

Walker’s $122 Million Bribe

“It’s literally a guy saying, ‘I’m Scott Walker running for re-election. Have some money!’” said Mandela Barnes, the former Milwaukee Democratic legislator now running for lieutenant governor. “Everyone I’ve talked to sees it as a blatant payoff.” This election-year giveaway is expected to cost the state about $122 million dollars and benefit 671,000 families.

Every one of those families should be encouraged to apply for every single dollar. But there is another thing everyone should realize about Walker’s one-time, nine-figure, election-year giveaway. It won’t make any difference at all to anyone’s life. It will disappear shortly after a family receives it, and no one will even remember where it went.

That’s what makes this paltry election-year bribe very different from every other political payoff of more than $100 million that Walker has passed out in his political career. The enormous cash giveaways that go to the big boys at the top with every single state or national tax cut by Republicans don’t get shared with every ordinary Tom, Dick and Harry off the street. They’re certainly not divided up into tiny $100 checks and tossed like chicken feed to hundreds of thousands of hard-pressed, ordinary families.

No, the enormous public cash giveaways to the people who really matter to Walker are more likely to be in the hundreds of millions or even billions of dollars. For the next quarter-century, Wisconsin will be in hock for billions to Terry Gou, the Taiwanese billionaire who made glowing promises of high-tech jobs that, in the future, are more likely to be performed by high-tech robots than human beings.

There’s something else you need to know about the insultingly small political payoffs Walker is passing out to families this election year. They won’t create a single job. They won’t hire a single teacher. They won’t reduce soaring college student loans by a cent. They won’t fill a single pothole.

Every family absolutely should apply for their election-year bribe from Walker. They certainly can use the money. But then they should vote for someone in November who will begin restoring all the community services Walker has devastated. We need our tax dollars benefiting our fellow citizens rather than having our governor delivering semitrailers of cash to the people Walker and his Republican friends truly care about.

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Joel McNally is a national-award-winning newspaper columnist and a longtime political commentator on Milwaukee radio and television. Since 1997, Joel has written a column for the Shepherd Express where he also was editor for two years.

Comments (4)

Tax cuts

Naturally the tax cuts will go the people who pay taxes. Not the sluggards. It will go to the smarter and harder working people who choose high responsibility job with larger incomes. Not the ones who choose the happy go lucky low wage jobs. As for a bribe, you call $100 a child a bribe. Thats barely worth the time of filling out the paperwork. You really think someone with two kids is going to waste their time with the paper work? Make it $500 and then its worthwhile.

djlmore than 1 year ago

The Democrats did worse...

122 million, at $100 per child that is 1.22 million kids over those 671,000 families, at 1.82 kids per family on average, tell me how far $182 per family is going to last?

To the Conservatives in my life, Governor Doyle did far worse... he used his partial veto power to change what our locally elected State Senators and Assembly members put in place by Democratic majority vote in our legislature. He moved a mere $400,000 from our DOT road construction and maintenance funds and "gave it away" to unionized Public School teachers who were educated in our "liberal" UW university system, "hippie" Madison and "black" north-side Milwaukee's UWM, the "old state teacher's college".

In their Conservative eyes this damage is permanent and can never be recovered from... well maybe when Wisconsin can totally cut out aid to Wisconsin's minorities that voted for Obama, cut their pre-existing conditions off of Obamacare.

Anyone who cannot "act White Christian" and make sure that their non-European ancestry stays forever as 2nd class below those of European ancestry needs to "self-deport" from our great state.

To these Conservatives who used to vote "blue collar" or "working class" old Democrat, the post 1960's Democrats made a far bigger "bribe" on a national level, it is called "welfare", or white tax money to poor blacks, all to "buy" the black vote, the very people that Conservatives know should never have gotten citizenship, much less the right to vote..

You can never convince this modern day Republican voter of anything else, any "facts" to the contrary will always be labelled as "fake news" to them.

As for taxes, it will always be seen as money taken from the paycheck with my white name on it and given back as checks with someone else's non-white name on it, someone who did not work hard for it like I did.

Money used to take care of the roads I drive on does not count, because other people who I don't like are allowed to drive welfare Cadillacs on them or walk on the curbs and shoulders. Just give me the check with me and my neighbors name on it and allow me and my neighbors to control who is allowed to drive on it or prevented from using it and we will take care of that road ourselves. -- THAT is the good old boy Wisconsin way.

Our business leaders had a good run for awhile, they got to where they could take a 20-40% profit off of a cash economy that profited from inflation fueled rising credit card debt that blinded our consumers from seeing jobs going to China after Nixon's Kissinger opened that up.

That is what our business leaders need, to get the 40% profit stream going again despite the high-paying jobs not being there. They need to have anyone who cannot pay fashion-conscious full retail price to leave Wisconsin, leave the US. Only people who have enough job to maintain minimum credit payment while they rack up a higher balance should be allowed to stay, that is "our most valued Citizen". They live large, but stay out of politics.

SE Wisc. Citizenmore than 1 year ago

Two thumbs up

To quote a notorious neocon, "Ditto".

blurondomore than 1 year ago

Did you see my sarcastic change-up?

The first part of my rant fits the Walker-Trump-Reagan rhetoric, how "Democrats" are nothing by evil that want to take money from whites and give it ALL to n-words and border crossers.

No... I just said that tell you how Conservative "people who look like me" think. It is positively segregationist and white supremacist, and it is hateful and despicable.

But the 2nd part of my rant was to show how greedy and selfish these people were, that their business leaders are really running the show and will take advantage of even the White Middle Class. It is more of a slam that the modern "business model" paints the worker and the consumer as 2 separate groups of people, meant to be separated by an uncrossable border, no support of the idea of the "working consumer" where we as non-owners of business must live a life of "pay as we go."

Where did the Henry Ford idea go that "my workers should be paid well enough to buy the products they make", where did that idea go?

Also in that 2nd part was the role of "consumer credit" in all this, how the idea of government debt is not the problem, but how working people like you or me living off of Private credit of Mortgages, Auto Loans, Credit Cards, Student Loans is really the source of the money that feeds our retailors bottom lines, how this private debt spread out among millions of Americans is the real problem we have.

I knew that private debt was going to be our problem when I was taught in Econ 101 in the 70's that bank credit was how money was created... money to be taken as private business profit, but leave the private consumer with having to roll it over to someone else instead of ever paying it back. THAT was the true cause of the 2008 crash.

Poverty is rising faster in the suburbs than it is in the ghettos, and there are those who think the "Assistance" money should go to those working people falling out of affluence instead of being applied to those non-workers in danger of starvation.

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